Thursday, February 18, 2016

Satellites aren’t small or cheap.
The Solar Dynamics Observatory
launched by NASA in 2010 weighs about 6,800 pounds and cost $850 million
to build and put into orbit.
Even the satellites built under NASA’s Discovery Program, aimed at
encouraging development of low-cost spacecraft, still have price tags
beyond the reach of smaller companies or research organizations: one
such satellite, the sun-particle collecting Genesis, ran up $164 million
in expenses despite its modest design and mission.
But that’s beginning to change as increasingly powerful technology
comes in increasingly smaller packages.
For example, in 2010 NASA and
the Department of Defense launched the Fast, Affordable, Science and
Technology Satellite, aptly called FASTSAT.
Weighing in at just 400
pounds, FASTSAT cost just $10 million and carried out six experiments in
orbit, proving that low-cost, quick-to-assemble spacecraft were
possible.
You could say that NASA was just getting started.

Satellite imaging has revolutionized our knowledge of the Earth, with detailed images of nearly every street corner readily available online.

But Planet Labs' Will Marshall says we can do better and go faster — by getting smaller.

He introduces his tiny satellites — no bigger than 10 by 10 by 30 centimeters — that, when launched in a cluster, provide high-res images of the entire planet, updated daily.

Small Wonders

Pete Klupar, director of engineering at Ames Research Center, was
fond of pulling a government-issued smartphone out of his pocket during
speeches and wondering aloud why the phone, which had a faster processor
and better sensors than many satellites, cost so little in comparison —
after which he slipped the phone back in his pocket and carried on.

An Ames researcher named Chris Boshuizen took Klupar’s musings to
heart.
Having seen the phone schtick before, Boshuizen and his colleague
Will Marshall once interjected during a talk by Klupar when he began to
muse aloud about satellite costs.
“We said, ‘Pete, don’t put that back in your pocket,’” Boshuizen recalls.
“‘We’re going to make that into a satellite.’”

By September 2013, a NASA team originally led by Boshuizen and
Marshall successfully launched its first PhoneSats into low-Earth orbit
at a cost of just $7,000 each.
Named Alexander, Graham and Bell, the
three mini-orbiters took pictures from space and beamed the data back to
Earth, demonstrating for the first time that a consumer-grade
smartphone could be used to power a satellite in space.
Successive
generations of PhoneSats, launched by NASA and housed inside of
CubeSats, have since demonstrated increasingly greater capabilities.

Meanwhile, Boshuizen and Marshall — joined by Robbie Schingler,
another research scientist at Ames — left NASA to found Planet Labs Inc., a company focused on using cheap, off-the-shelf commercial
components to build ever-smaller satellites.
“Instead of doing it the old-school Apollo way, with a lot of system
design and analysis and then building the thing at the end, we decided
to do it the software way, which is building a minimum-viable prototype
first just to show that we have a working model, then going on from
there,” Boshuizen says of the process they used to create their
satellites, a strategy the company calls “agile aerospace.”

Open California: Our Data, Your Creativity

Planet Labs released their growing California archive under an a CC BY-SA license.

Join their community of image analysts, scientists, developers, and researchers.

Turning Insight into Action

The first prototypes proved promising enough that the company had no
trouble raising funds from venture capitalists.
That money, in turn,
allowed the company to hire engineers and produce more of the
satellites, named Doves, improving them with each iteration until they
were ready for full-scale deployment.

By February 2014, the company dispatched the first of its commercial
“flock,” when 28 Doves were released from the International Space
Station.
These were followed by further deployments that brought the
fleet’s total to more than 130 satellites — enough to produce
high-resolution imagery of nearly the entire globe on a daily basis.
“We’re going to be gaining insight into the changing planet in a way
no one’s ever gotten before,” Boshuizen says of the Doves’ abilities.

The private sector is eager for such real-time information.
Insurance
companies can use the images to verify damages claimed by homeowners
and progress on repairs, while commodity trackers can track agricultural
crops to forecast yields.
The oil and gas industry can monitor
pipelines for safety, while mobile-phone companies can use the satellite
imagery for improved map applications on smartphones.

The company is dedicated to providing technology that adds
environmental and humanitarian value, and Boshuizen says monitoring
forests is a top priority.
“If you’re able to plot tree logging in an area where no one is
supposed to be logging trees, then you’d be able to do something about
it,” he says.
“We have the vision of turning insight into action, and
what that means is being able to see things and stop them before they
become a problem.”